Widmerpool’s Valedictory

Lydia Kiesling

Hallo, friends.  I would like to apologize for the dearth of entries in the past week, and to make an exciting announcement.  “IRL,” my name is Lydia, and I have done three guest posts under that name for fancy literature blog The Millions.  (This is not a secret, obviously; I have linked to said posts on this blog, in fact many of you are probably here because of said posts.)  Last week, they offered me a spot as a regular contributor, and I have accepted.  I am taking a week’s holiday to do my actual job and also read seventy-five books, and my first post as one of “the crew” should appear next week.  I will do at least two, but hopefully more like four posts per month.  All this is good news for me because I will be in the milieu of a number of talented writers and readers, and because literally everyone in the world reads The Millions, and because I will soon become personal friends with Joyce Carol Oates and simply swim in hundred dollar bills.  However, it also means that I am retiring Widmerpool’s Modern Library Revue.   I will continue in the same vein on The Millions (Modern Library list books and digressions), but there will be no edition information, and no soothing green and grey background.

We have spent only a few short weeks together, but I have been surprised and moved by the interest you have shown this blog, and I hope that you will continue to read my work at its new home.  This site will stay up, so you can still visit and reminisce about the good old days of February and March 2009.  I feel a pithy remark in Latin would be a good way to end things, but I only know two, and they don’t make any sense here.  Besides, Samuel Butler tells us, “Latin and Greek are great humbugs; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are.”  Rather than digging up my old yearbook (“don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”), or infecting my computer with a virus by searching horrible quotations websites, I will suggest that you read Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, which is basically a compendium of the right stuff from old Gustave.  Me, I like “Whatever else happens, we remain stupid.”

Thank you all fore reading and see you at The Millions!

Sexy time for the last time! The first edition of Flaubert’s Parrot (not on the ML list, but wonderful) is London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.  Lots and lots of copies from $850 down.  Here is Peter Harrington’s copy, offered for $330:

Onward!

#72 A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

[Sir] V[idiadhar]  S[urajprasad] Naipaul

I think it is pointless to condemn books solely because the writer was some variety of wretch.  But I have done so if I think it will create a smoke-screen for the fact that I did not understand the book.  If I liked it, I am inclined to be more relaxed, to make hand gestures and say things like “What a man, but what an artist.”  For example, the poems of Ezra Pound mystify me, so I make sure to remind everyone quite needlessly that he was an anti-semitic, Grade A Best Quality fuckwad.  On the other hand, I recently learned that Eric Gill, famous book arts figure and maker of things like this, sexually abused his children and his dog, which I think is worse than anything old Ezra ever got up to.  But I still think his art is neat and I think it’s okay to think so.

Several years ago I remember reading Naipaul’s A Way in the World and finding it very boring and hard to understand.  Although, having just this minute skimmed a few reviews, it seems that either I was actually reading a different book altogether, possibly a math textbook, or that I am an incurable philistine and must be killed.   In fairness, this may have been during one of the still frequent and inexplicable periods in my life when the only things I want to read are A Girl of the Limberlost or Betsy In Spite of Herself (why, why), and should attempt nothing else.  Recognizing that V. S. Naipaul is a Distinguished Man of Letters I felt sheepish about not enjoying his book, but a couple of years later I received a boon in the form of an article about him, one which revealed him to be a terrible bastard.  So I felt that all was well, and turned my defeat into a victory over sin.  It was in this admirable spirit that I approached A House for Mr Biswas, disdainful and yet cagy, as you would a fraud you suspect is smarter than you.  My prejudice colored the first third of the book, so that when things got grimly fun and picaresque, I reminded myself that V. S. Naipaul is a jerk.  By the end, though, I had become a quiet convert to the novel’s quiet charms.  By which I do not mean to say that I wish to hold hands with V. S. Naipaul or lie down next to him, rather that I found the story very stirring and sad.  It warmed and then unpleasantly squeezed my small heart.

The novel is about the shortish life of a singular man named Mohun Biswas.  The narrative opens with a prologue, which explains the whole story in a nutshell, and tells us that Mr Biswas is ill and not long for this world.  Chapter one begins with his birth in a village hut on the island of Trinidad, and the story takes us through the whole circus of his life.  Mr Biswas is born, he gets hustled into marriage, and for 500 pages he laments his life, has nervous breakdowns of varying degrees of magnitude, and schemes to acquire a house.  He gets the house, it’s miserable and then magical, he gets sick, and dies.  He has four children, lots of jobs, little money, a shitload of inlaws, and the most ornery, pathetic, foolish, cruel and marginally lovable disposition you could imagine.  And I don’t mean he is simply the third-world equivalent to the protagonist of a My Dick novel.  He is something special.  This is not a bildungsroman; it is a Biswasroman.

Although, like I said, I started the novel with an ill will and was disinclined to like anybody in it, I think Naipaul very carefully forged the narrative so that the reader goes through a variety of stages with regard to Mr Biswas.  You are angry that he is such a pain in the ass and mean to his wife.  You are depressed about his living conditions, even though he is living better than many.  You admit that his life has become unmanageable.   You deny that you are enjoying the book.   You accept that you kind of like Mr Biswas.  You write V. S. Naipaul a letter apologizing.  Or something like that.  He also lulls you, that V. S. Naipaul, referring to Mr Biswas as “Mr Biswas” from page one.  The use of the honorific for someone to whom so little honor is given, but who takes himself so seriously, it tugs at the heart.   There are lots of things that tug at the heart, especially toward the end.  Their son Anand, a clever, touchy bastard like his father, gets third in the school exhibition exams, and I felt so relieved, like I, too, had put all my happiness eggs in his brain basket.  I just wish he had written more letters home once he went off to abroad.

There is something distant, almost cold, about the writing; it doesn’t feel like Naipaul is holding everybody in his hand, rather at arm’s length.  But he must have had some affection for this family to write about them so; maybe it’s a case of being very stern and grumpy with everyone so that you don’t collapse into sniffles.

Sexy time! The first edition is London: Andre Deutsch, 1961.  There do not seem to be very many really nice copies for sale.  Adrian Harrington has one at $1,400.  There are signed copies at $4,500, $6,950, and a signed copy with the wraparound band for $12,500.  Here is the signed copy of the first American edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 1961, offered by Matthew Raptis for $2,750; the dust jacket is the same design on both editions, except that the American says McGraw Hill on it.  Sorry this picture is tiny:

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# 68 Main Street (1920)

Sinclair Lewis

Is at The Millions.

#4 Lolita (1955)

Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita is a Big Deal.  Since the day it first appeared in its unobtrusive green wrappers it has given rise to a sustained, high-pitched keening sound — the sound of everyone freaking right out.  It has inspired people to write essays with many words in them.  It has inspired people to wring their hands and besiege librarians on behalf of those delicate blossoms, the children.  To produce even 600-1000 words on this novel in a hitherto un-utilized combination is a nervewracking proposition.  Tonight I will probably dream that a scowling Martin Amis is putting a cigarette out on my neck.  Or Nabokov himself will appear and tell me that he’s having a party but I’m not invited.  I have in fact read the book, which is more than I suspect can be said for a few of its detractors, and it is in the Modern Library top five, so I have to get to it sometime.  The only thing to do is soldier on, unafraid.

If Lolita were a Craigslist ad, here’s how it would go: Charming older man seeks very young lady for companionship and more.  Orphans preferred.  Knobby knees a plus.  Benefits include missing school, unlimited sodas.  This position is full-time; compensation negotiated daily.  No fatties or phone calls, please.

Yes.  Lolita is a novel about a man who wants to have sex with little girls,  and who indeed has sex with one little girl in particular.  Therein lies the freakout.  Here’s my theory: As human beings we have collectively decided that children are off-limits, which is an excellent place for them.  And while good people are often quite willing to go (in a literary sense) on sexy romps inside the minds of cheaters, beaters, thieves, murderers, or other kinds of assholes, relishing thoughts and experiences that are far outside their common round, they are scandalized when they realize they have been having a great time with this monster Humbert.  Laughing at his jokes.  Sighing with relief when his dumb wife gets hit with a car and leaves him to ravage the little one in peace.  Thinking, even, that the little one deserves her treatment.  Maybe getting an accidental boner during the sexy parts.  I think that freaking out about this book’s content is a form of protesting too much, when you don’t need to protest at all.  It’s okay to like Humbert.  That’s the point of the book.  This man Nabokov was a genius.  He used words in a language that was not his own to make you think a molester was kind of a fun guy.  To write like this in any language, let alone your second, is a goddamned miracle.  I want to say settle down and don’t take it all so seriously but that is what people say when other people legitimately call them out for being racist or sexist or one of the other popular ists.  Words do matter.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that if this book sticks in your craw think about it this way: Lolita matters because it is about an unsavory topic; because it is in a sense the ne plus ultra of what language and art can do.

If you get all this but think it’s wrong to use words to make comedy out of something horrible, that’s fair enough.  You should, however, turn off the television, cancel your internet service and avoid the company of others.  Then there are people who simply don’t like the book because they think it’s bad writing or something, which is of course fine too.  That’s just, like, your opinion.  At any rate, all this territory is well-trod.  The only thing to do is share a personal testimonial from me, your friend Widmerpool.  One Saturday I had a small hangover.  I mixed tuna fish with yogurt, a touch of mayonnaise, green onion, and lemon and put it on melba toast crackers.  I poured a coca-cola over ice.  I took the snacks to the couch, lay down, and read Lolita all the way through.  Verily it was one of the most pleasant days of my life.  And that’s what reading is all about.

Sexy time! Lolita was first published in two volumes by the sexy Olympia press of Paris, after which it was promptly banned in France, and remained so for three years.  The first issue is expensive, but not scarce.  There are a number of copies between $3,000 and $11,500, with signed or presentation copies at $39,000 and $50,000.  Here is a nearly fine copy which Between the Covers is selling for $9,000:

The first American edition is New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, (1955).  The first printing is not uncommon but varies wildly in price from the middle $100 region to $5,000, largely depending on condition.  Here is a near fine copy in a near fine jacket, which Royal books is selling for $2,750:

The first British edition was London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959.  There are a number of copies from, $100-$500.  Here is a very good copy in a goodish dust jacket, from Madoc books:

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#42 Deliverance (1970)

James Dickey

I have seriously mixed feelings about this book.  First off, it is part of the group of post-war novels by/about American men who are peeved because getting old is boring and their wives aren’t very sexy.  Please forgive my bawdy language, but let’s call them the My Dick novels, with major sub-genres My Dick is Awesome and  I Feel Bad About my Dick.   I used to read these without discrimination, but one day the veil fell from my eyes and I realized that these books could bring about a serious crisis of self-esteem for me as a lady.  One doesn’t need constant reminders that one’s significant other will stare in horror at one’s posterior fifteen years from now, and try to do it with the underaged person responsible for looking after the children for whom, theoretically, one will have compromised one’s parts in order to expel.  I’m told that women get increasingly humorless as well as physically repulsive as the years go by, but I like these novels if they are really funny.  The Water-Method Man, for example, is a Widmerpool favorite, although John Irving is an important figure in the My Dick movement.

Deliverance is the opposite of funny.  The leather vest that Burt Reynolds is wearing on the cover of my copy is funny, but that is the only thing.  Here’s what happens: the narrator has three friends and one of them is muscular and the narrator kind of loves him because he is so manly.  The narrator also wants to do it with this girl who is a model at his ad agency and has golden eyes or something, maybe that’s another book.  Anyway, these four friends decide to go canoeing on an insane river they don’t know anything about and the narrator and the muscle-y one bring bows and arrows.  So they’re on the river, some rednecks rape one of them and they are about to assault the narrator and then the muscle-y one, Lewis, shoots one of the rednecks through the chest with an arrow.  The other redneck gets away and hides and kills one of the friends and Lewis breaks his leg and it’s up to the narrator to stop being such a soft-living, house-having nancy all the time and find that bastard and kill him with his bow and arrow.  Which he does, after some feats of strength and things that sound like they hurt a lot.

All of this is told in a self-consciously poetic way, as if the author wrote it while sitting behind a duck blind with a camouflaged type-writer, looking at a picture of Walt Whitman and listening to Wagner or something.  Sometimes I was grooving with it and sometimes I was thinking that if I must read about scary gross things I’d rather get my copy of The Stand out from under the bed and at least have a good time.  Then I wouldn’t have to read sentences like this one: “The standing there was so good, so fresh and various and continuous, so vital and uncaring around my genitals, that I hated to leave it.”  Hee!

So that’s what happens in the story, but let’s talk about what’s really bothering me.  Bobby has been raped, Lewis the muscle-y one has killed the redneck, and they’re all four standing around talking about what to do, and the narrator goes ahead and says:

“I moved away from Bobby’s red face.  None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me.  I remembered how he had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was when he screamed.”

What a super attitude to have about your friend who was sexually assaulted at gunpoint!  Ecce homo!  Basically the narrator is feeling pretty smug about not being the one to get “cornholed,” as he charmingly puts it, and about the fact that dreamy Lewis was put out of commission and it was up to him to save the day!  I’m not one of those horrible literal-minded turds who thinks Lolita or, I don’t know, The Collector, are offensive, because I understand that you can write about things and not do them or think them yourself.  It is not the novelist’s job to provide an edifying story or a lovable narrator.  However, not only was I pretty lukewarm about the alleged Everyman of Deliverance, the writing style did not, for me, elevate things in any meaningful way.  Quite possibly I am missing something.  Maybe it’s a generational thing that I can’t understand.  Maybe it is a Vietnam thing.  Obviously it is a dick(ey) thing.  I don’t know.  I’m just saying how I feel.

Sexy time!  The first edition is Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.  There are lots and lots and lots of copies for sale, starting at around $700 for presumably very fine presentation copies, and going all the way down.  Here is  a fine copy in a very good jacket, which Between the Covers is selling for $125:

And here is the comical vest.  If loving Burt Reynolds is wrong, I wish never to be right:

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#8 Darkness at Noon (1940)

Arthur Koestler

Is at The Millions.

[Off-Brand] A Suitable Boy (1993)

Vikram Seth

I was fretting that two off-list posts in one week was not quite the thing, particularly when this venture is so new, but then I realized that I am a person and I pay taxes and I can do what I like.  Furthermore, I feel that A Suitable Boy does more for the soul on a rainy Thursday then, for example, The Sheltering Sky, or something by Lawrence “Larry” Durrell.  If you are the sort who panics when rules are broken please try to stay calm, and we shall return to the list in short order.  I feel quite certain that The Great Gatsby will still be there.

Now then.  I love this book dearly.  It makes me feel all the feelings that I think publishers are hoping women will feel when they see  a book  cover featuring a pair of high heels and a shopping bag and a poodle.  It makes me want to lie on a boudoir sofa and drink a bottle of wine, while wearing a very expensive bathrobe made of kittens.  What I am trying to say, in a way that makes no sense at all, is that A Suitable Boy is transporting and it is a true and rare pleasure and I would read it every month were it not a thousand pages long.  I still try to do it pretty often.

The novel centers around several interrelated (middle to upper-middle class) Indian families in the period just following Independence.  The heroine, a charming, bookish thing named Lata, attends University in Brahmpur.  Lata’s beloved father is dead, and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, a kind-hearted and thoroughly aggravating person, has nothing to do but fuss over Lata and her three siblings.  The titular suitable boy is the  elusive creature that Mrs. Rupa Mehra hopes to secure for Lata, thus ensuring happiness and grandchildren.  Lata, on the other hand, has already come across a most unsuitable boy, a sexy cricketer who is also a muslim.  This wouldn’t do at all in the very best of times, but this story takes place immediately following Partition, which sounds like it was the least fun possible, and Lata’s big problem is, if you will, a microcosm of one of India’s big problems.

So, in a nutshell of alarming size, Lata loves Kabir, who is smart and hot and loves her, and he has a crazy mother, and Lata is not allowed to hold hands with him because of religion and her own crazy mother.  Her lovely sister is married to a nice guy named Maan, who is an English professor who wants to advance his career but can’t because his boss is an asshole who gives lectures entitled “Eliot: Whither?”  His brother Pran is a playboy type who falls in love with Saeeda Bai, a sexy courtesan with a heart which is neither gold nor is it stone, who sings songs and has a sister who is actually her daughter by the Nawab of Baitar, who is a muslim who is a Big Deal.  His two sons are best friends with Maan, and one of them may actually have made out with him but this is not explored.  Their sister is in purdah, which is a fun thing wherein ladies hang out in one part of the house and only see men who are related to them.  It is like being in your moon tent, but all the time.  You can do it if you are a Muslim or a Hindu, so an equal opportunity kind of business.   Playboy Pran loves Saeeda Bai so much that he endeavors to learn Urdu for her, and goes to live in the country with whats-his-name, the one who goes crazy.  Lata, remember her, has a brother who works in a company in Calcutta, and he is a dick and basically wants to be an Englishman and he is mean to his little brother who lives with him, who drinks all the time and likes betting.  The mean brother has a wife named Meenakshi and she is no one’s favorite, but she comes from a big family which is frivolous and hip and fun in a way that only rich families can be.  Lata kicks it with them for a while, when Mrs. Ruba Mehra spirits her away from the muslim and does her annual all-India railway pilgrimage.  Meanwhile the peripheral figure of Haresh the shoe-facilitator makes his way to the center of things.  And there are also musicians, shoe-makers,  tanners, lusty rajahs, politicians, laborers and spiritual types.  There is literature and religion and a lot of politics, some of which I don’t understand but is neat  to read about anyway.  There is the abolition of the Zamindari system which I gather is feudalism, and there is religious violence and the settling of scores and all of the shit that happens when you have an enormous nation trying to figure out how to be independent together, but where you have some people you can’t see and some you can’t touch.  As I have said in an earlier post, I do not read non-fiction, so A Suitable Boy was a good way for me to learn a smidge of Indian history.  And also exciting new terms, like covenanted, and scheduled caste, and ghazal, and nimbu pani.

The scope, as they say, is breathtaking.  I bought this book when I went to India because I wanted to learn something about India that was not the guide book or my very confusing book about Hinduism, and also to have something to read on the train.  It was a stupid thing to do, since it weighed several pounds, but I loved it so much, and I was able to use it as a pillow.  It was very strange to read while in India because it is a portrait of, among other things: 1. A time that has past.  2. A milieu that you don’t encounter if you are a tourist, and you don’t know anyone, and you have a tiny budget.  You see one India while you are reading about another.  It’s like visiting New York for the first time and sleeping on a sidewalk and reading, I don’t know, The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Or maybe John Cheever.

The last thing I have to say is that when I started reading A Suitable Boy, the writing itself seemed very slightly pedestrian.  I only thought this for the first couple of pages, and then I was swept away completely into the wonderful story.  This novel is a living, breathing thing, greater than the sum of its parts.  And it is in its odd way a feel-good story.  Terrible things happened but I felt always that the characters were being gently carried along in the hands of a benevolent god with the face of Vikram Seth.

Sexy time! This is not actually a very sexy time because the book is so recently published that it is hard to sort out what’s what and there is not, to my knowledge, a bibliography to consult.

So, the first British edition is London: Phoenix House, 1993.  Waiting for Godot Books has a fine copy in fine dust jacket for $40.  The American edition was, I think, issued after, and is New York: HarperCollins, 1993.  Quill & Brush has a fine copy in fine dust jacket, signed, for $50.  It was possibly published in India first, Delhi: Viking, 1993.  Robert Wright Books is selling a copy for $198.  Finally, there is some kind of fancy signed limited edition bound in morocco and lettered A-Z.  Here is a copy of that offered for $1,240:

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#24 Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Sherwood Anderson

Several years ago I bought Winesburg, Ohio with high hopes.  Possibly because the back of the book stated, in so many words, that  it was the best thing to happen to us since the refrigerator.  It also printed ringing endorsements from Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca West, and Jesus Christ.  I read the first few chapters, felt nonplused, got into a black rage, and gave up.   During my bi-monthly sulk, when I look at the bookshelf and think “I’ve got nothing to read,” I sometimes looked at the unfinished book and felt oppressed.  “I’ve already read that,” I would lie, aloud, to no one in particular. “That one doesn’t count.”  Recently, feeling that if one doesn’t succeed the first time, it is prudent to try again, I plucked it from the shelf and gave it a wary second chance.

I think I have identified my original problem with the book.  I am one of those lucky bastards who can read very quickly.  Certain writing styles are better suited to my hyperactive eye; say, British novels with exceedingly long sentences.  For example, here is a sentence from A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell:

“Mr. Deacon must have visited the house at least half a dozen times when I was a child, occasions when, by some unlikely chance, I had seen and spoken with him more then once; though I do not know why our paths should have crossed in this manner, because he was always reported ‘not to like children,’ so that our meetings, such as they were, would not have been deliberately arranged on the part of my parents.”

One sentence!  The eye just skips right along.  Here, however, is a sentence from Sherwood Anderson’s opus:

“All over his body Jesse Bentley was alive.”

Okay, the sentences of Winesburg, Ohio are not all so short, but they seem to stop very suddenly, making the eye lurch.  It is like when someone stops to pick up a shiny thing on the sidewalk directly in front of you, and you are forced to halt and say expletives.  Or like when you are watching an episode of Arrested Development on stolen internet, and have to sit through endless buffering.  The sensation is one of sea-sickness, and rage.  Sherwood Anderson also makes use of the artsy device of having the characters speak in exactly the same voice as the rest of the narrative, especially when they are talking to themselves.  For example, one character says “He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness.  Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow.  It is the thing I let be killed in myself.”  I think we can all agree that at no time has anyone talked like this.  It’s another thing that takes some getting used to.

When I picked up Winesburg for round two, I had to stop for a moment and rack my brain because I was reminded of something and I couldn’t think what it was.  Then I realized that it was John Steinbeck, and that he owes rather a large debt to old Winesburg.  The same lurching, the same bizarre utterances from alleged “just folks.”  The only difference is that Steinbeck did sexy plots, while Winesburg has no plot, but everyone is getting sexy.

What I learned from Winesburg, Ohio, are the following: 1. Religion is scary. 2.  Ladies are crazy, and need lots of hugs and kisses or they go bad.  I also learned that small-town life was significantly more thrilling before the advent of anti-depressants and internet pornography.  Basically the novel is like a literary precursor to the DSM.  Present in this little burg are examples of Tourette’s, Borderline Personality, and a whole slew of neuroses worth many billable hours, many of them fixated for some reason upon this young fellow George Willard.

I don’t know.  There is certainly something moving and luminous about the vignettes in Winesburg, Ohio, but I like my early twentieth century American novels to be a certain way.  Specifically, I like them to be by Sinclair Lewis and I like them to make me angry and wish all decent, hard-working Americans at the bottom of the ocean.  I feel comfortable when everyone’s motives are transparent, and also despicable.     Winesburg, Ohio, in a sense truer to life, aims deeper than your basic preacher:pervert truism; the preacher is a pervert, yes, but everyone else has a lot of feelings too and sometimes they don’t make any fucking sense.

Sexy time!  Lord, this book is not cheap in the dust jacket.  It is New York: B. Huebsch, 1919.  Between-the-Covers is selling this fine copy in a near fine dust jacket for $20,000:

Thomas Goldwasser has a copy signed by Anderson, probably one of his own copies, for $45,000.  Lloyd Currey has a copy at $15,000.  J. Cahill has a signed copy in a chipped dust jacket at $12,500.  Copies without dust jackets are $1,200 and below.  Here is Manhattan Rare Book Company’s copy, at $1,200:

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#66 Of Human Bondage (1915)

You can view today’s entry at The Millions.  They very kindly invited me to contribute.

[Off-Brand] The Sea, The Sea (1978)

Iris Murdoch

I clearly stipulated in this thing that I might not confine myself to the Modern Library list.  Iris Murdoch is on there (#95, Under the Net, 1954), but I haven’t read that one, and I want to talk about Iris Murdoch, and if it’s good enough for the Booker prize it’s good enough for Widmerpool’s Modern Library Revue.

Iris Murdoch is strange and wonderful.  She also wrote so many novels that if you are in the mood to read something by her, there is probably a fresh one available.  It’s like having a harem wherein all the inmates are related to one another and look alike, yet retain sterling qualities of their own.  She probably wrote a book where that happens, too.  A major theme, for lack of a better word, in her work is the preponderance of profoundly unlovable people therein.  It gets me every time.  First everyone seems perfectly nice, despite their precious names, and their high-flown manner of speaking, and their interminable singing of songs that no regular person could ever know the words to, let alone four people setting together in the same room.  And then things get going and each character turns out to be a villainous entitled sexist fucker, or an infuriating servile nitwit, or simply mad as an ever-loving hatter, and suddenly you look up from the page and think to yourself, “I hate everyone in this book.”  Often I wish for an avenging castrator ex machina to arrive and show some of the male characters what’s what.  Unfortunately, as in life, rarely do the worst Murdoch characters get their just desserts.  There is an elegant causality at work in her plots, but the rain falls and the sun shines on the righteous (what few of them there are) and the unrighteous alike.  “Sic biscuitus disintegrat,” I learned in The Sea, The Sea.

Charles Arrowby, the narrator of this novel, is a perfect Murdoch character.  He’s a celebrity theatre director (which does not sound like a real thing), and he has left the limelight and retired to the country.  The book begins and he’s writing in his journal saying “Hallo, I’ve just moved to this house by the sea,” and “I like to eat funny things,” and “I don’t respect women,” and it’s a bit insufferable but hardly insane.  Then half-way through the book he runs into his high-school sweetheart (now past sixty) who once broke his tiny heart, and then he decides to kidnap her and hold her against her will, and all his old acquaintances show up  including lovely Buddhist cousin James who is just trying to help, and Charles freaks out and is mean to James because he has a jealousy problem as well as some alarming pseudo-oedipal thing for James’s long-dead mother, Charles’s Aunt Estelle.  And then at the end, when the kidnapped lady has finally been returned to her husband and two people are dead, old Charles is back in London, possibly about to have relations with a seventeen-year-old.  And this is a character I like!  This is, dare I say, a top fifteen Widmerpool favorite novel!  She’s a magician, that Iris Murdoch!

One benefit of everyone being sort of awful is that you don’t really worry about them and can just enjoy the story and Charles’ acid narrative, which includes lines like this: “I did not recall saying this nor did it sound like anything which anyone would say more than once, assuming he had ever had the misfortune to say it at all . . .”  And the food!  Charles has a giant bee in his bonnet about food, which is something about the old boy that I can really get behind.  Here are two of his meals:

“. . . spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil . . . Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill.  Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil, and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in.  With these a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef”

“. . . egg poached in hot scrambled egg, then the coley braised with onions and lightly dusted with curry powder, and served with a little tomato ketchup and mustard . . . Then a heavenly rice pudding.”

And on and on.  I don’t know what some of those things are, but I yearn for them anyway.  It’s a delightful aspect of the book, somehow.

Sexy time!  The first edition is London: Chatto and Windus, 1978.  There are a number of fine copies in the  $100-$250 range, with very good copies under $100.  Adrian Harrington has one at $147.  Here is what the dust jacket looks like:

And here’s Iris Murdoch, that clever minx:

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#50 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Henry Miller

When I was in college I had a lot of deep thoughts.  Sometimes these thoughts came out of nowhere, like a stomach virus.  Sometimes I had them when I was reading books, and they caused me to circle key passages.  My copy of Tropic of Cancer has a lot of circling.  At one point, in fact, I circled four consecutive pages.  Let’s take a gander at a bit of it, shall we?

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.  I am only spiritually dead.  Physically I am alive.  Morally I am free.  The world which I have departed is a menagerie.  The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws.  If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one.  I go forth to fatten myself.”

Oh my!  Weren’t we the embryonic Objectivist?  I’m glad I terminated that mind-pregnancy.  This was also the time when I thought that poverty would be no problem if one was an artist and really Living.  L-i-v-i-n.  A time when I wanted to live in a tubercular Berlin hellhole with Christopher Isherwood, smoke cigarettes with George Orwell at the Hotel X, and sleep with men who fought in the Spanish Civil War.  I went so far with my yen for adventure as to apply for a job tending dog-sledding dogs in Iceland.  I did this even though I hate snow, and dogs.  I didn’t get the job, and I was relieved, because it said you had to be prepared to “break up fights and sustain injuries.”  I don’t know what I want to do now that I have a job and a feller and I quit smoking.  Be a Mitford sister, I guess, but not the Nazi sympathizer one, or pen pals with Roberto Bolaño.

Anyway, I’m not some kind of square now, if that’s what you’re thinking.  This was only, like, four years ago.  I just have to pay rent now.  I still like those books.  I still like Tropic of Cancer, too, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I mainly remember a) the part when the fellow pooed in the bidet b) learning that it used to be shocking and undesirable for ladies to have denuded parts c) reading that even people in the twentieth century thought safe sex meant a splash of water on said parts.  I guess I’m not the only person who fixated on those occurrences; they couldn’t publish the goddamned thing in the U.S. for three decades.

I can’t do a little plot thing for you here.  This book isn’t about plot; it’s about L-i-v-i-n.  It has so many words put together in so many exciting ways, but not too many words, or excessively novel ways like, for example, Ulysses.  It’s like a much dirtier, more thrilling Manhattan Transfer.  It’s a revelation. It’s the best thing he ever wrote.  Flipping through it again now it seems prudent to recommend that house-bound parents with small children, people who have to deal with members of the public in a service capacity, or anyone who’s just having a bad day should steer clear of this book, lest it encourage them to take off on in search of L-i-v-i-n.  I guess that’s why they wouldn’t let anyone read it for so long.  I wanted to leave you with the coolest celebrity photo I’ve ever seen, which I ripped out of a Vanity Fair a long time ago, but I can’t find it anywhere.  It was Henry Miller past fifty, with his feet in some wallabee-looking shoes propped on a desk piled with books, and he is lighting a cigarette because he does not care about cancer.

Sexy time! The first edition was Paris: Obelisk, 1934.  Here is a picture of the copy at the Massachusetts College of Art:

That is some provocative cover art.  The first edition in the original wrappers is scarce.  Currently there are no complete copies in the original state with the crab  cover art for sale.  Argosy has a first edition rebound in black morocco for $3,500.  The first authorized American edition was New York: Grove Press, 1961, in a limitation of 100 copies signed by Miller.  Peter Stern has a fine copy at $4,500.  There was an earlier pirated edition, New York [but really Mexico]: Medusa, 1940.  The man who published it went to jail for some ungodly amount of time, I think.  There are several copies in the $300-$600 range.  Ken Lopez has a copy in an early variant binding, purple wrappers, for $325.

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Reader’s #30 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

John Fowles

The Modern Library list is obviously problematic.  For one, the things it purports to measure are not quantifiable.  For another, almost everything on it was written by the white man, even though a number of other people did manage to set pen to paper during the last century with extraordinary results, when they weren’t being prevented from having a fun time by the white man.  Finally, Lucky Jim is not on the list, unless we are to understand that #85, Lord Jim, is a typographical error, which makes more sense.  Essentially, “best” is impossible to define because it is a wholly subjective concept, one which in this case has been colonized by the Literary Industrial Complex.  Presumably with all this in mind, Modern Library  compiled a Reader’s List, like Viewer’s Choice Awards, and posted it next to the official, or Board’s List, on the website.  I think we can agree that the Reader’s List appears to have been heavily influenced by a couple of demographics.  Numbers one through four, respectively, are Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Battlefield Earth, and The Lord of the Rings.  And yes, I haven’t even read anything by Ayn Rand, so I am a bad person, and I don’t know what I’m talking about.  I do want to read Atlas Shrugged, but I want to do it in a place where no one can see me, lest they think I subscribe to these charming ideals.  Anyway, this has gotten away from me, but I wanted to say that a) the Reader’s List exists b) nerds have a high voter turnout (not hating just saying) c) I support many of the selections, like this one, #30, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is not present on the Board’s List.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is non-threatening Post-Modernism for people who want to be with-it and read something Post-Modern but can’t understand a goddamned word of, for example, Gravity’s Rainbow.  And it is  good for people who like novels from an earlier time period, but also want to know what happened when the stays came unlaced and the pantalettes came off.  It’s about Charles, who is a hip Victorian gentleman, abreast of the hot new theories, like the one from that fellow Darwin.  He is going to be married to a proper Victorian lady named Ernestina, and he visits her in the country, but then he sees this creepy woman, “Tragedy,” née Sarah Woodruff, walking by the sea, and he finds out that she is a Fallen Woman who did ze unspeakable things with a Frenchman, even though she is really just a girl who never had a chance because she had too much education and not enough money.  He tries to help her ostensibly out of the kindness of his heart, but mostly because he thinks she’s easy, and then he finds out the whole thing was a lie and that really he is the vile deflower-er, and that means the death of the Victorian age and the onset of that Communism we hear so much about.  Also, there are two different endings to the novel (Po-Mo!) It is a magical book; it perfectly captures so many elements of novels written a hundred years earlier, and includes interesting tidbits, like the number of brothels present in London in 1867.  It also makes us examine ourselves as modern people because We Are All Charles, or something.

Sexy time! TFLW was inspired by a French novel called Ourika, Paris: Chez Ladvocat, 1824, which is about a Senegalese woman who comes to live with a fancy French family.  Everyone thinks she is great and smart, but she is nonetheless considered an inferior person.  The Brick Row Book Shop has a fine copy of the first published for $2,100.  Apparently 25 copies were privately printed prior to that; there are not currently any copies for sale.  Perhaps there are never copies for sale.  I don’t know.  John Fowles liked this book so much he translated it, and his translation was published by the Bird and Bull Press in a limitation of 500 copies, signed by Fowles, Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1977.  There are a number of copies for sale; the Brick Row Book Shop has a fine copy for $150.  The first edition of TFLW itself is London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.  There are lots of nice copies, many of them signed, from the $1,500 range to the $100 range; this is not an old or a scarce book, just a famous one.  Here is a fine copy from Peter Harrington, at $220.

They also have this fun item for $8,000.  It’s a fine copy of an elaborate edition, Lyme Regis: Serendip, 1981, one of 25 copies, published to mark the completion of the movie version.  It’s signed by Fowles as well as people involved in the film, including Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

#57 Parade’s End (1924-1928)

Ford Mad Dog Ford

Unlike Parade’s End, I’ll keep this short.  Suffice it to say that if you loved The Good Soldier and never wanted it to end, and you were excited to read something that would hopefully be just like TGS except thousands of pages longer, Parade’s End will be one of the more disappointing experiences of my life.  Erm, your life.  I’m not sure what went wrong; it’s about The Great War, the end of a marriage, the end of a Time When Men Were Men, or something.  It should have been right up my alley!  All that notwithstanding, I felt like I was dying.  Everything was ending so slowly!  Apparently W. H. Auden said “There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.”  First of all, something about that sentence is very confusing.  Secondly, I never liked Auden anyway, except that poem that was in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Sexy time! Argh, this is a pain in the ass because it is was four separate books published over four years (a “tetralogy,” if you will).  First came Some Do Not, London: Duckworth and Company, [1924], also published (simultaneously?) in the Transatlantic Review, which FMF founded.  I don’t see any copies of the book for sale, curiously.  Only fourth impressions of the second American edition.  Interesting.  The first should be green cloth with white lettering.   You can get all 12 issues of the Translantic Review for $5,000 at Jeffrey Marks.   After that was No More Parades, London: Duckworth, [1925], also in green cloth.  There are a number of copies online, Maggs has one for $220.  So not a super expensive book.  I can’t find a picture so here’s old Mad Dog:

See, he’s not so bad.  Then was A Man Could Stand Up, London: Duckworth, [1926].  Jeffrey Marks has a first edition in the dust jacket at $125, and William Reese has a second impression of the first edition, inscribed by Ford.  There are lots of copies of the first American edition (issued the same year by Albert and Charles Boni) at similar prices.  Finally The Last Post, which according to the bibliography I just found was actually issued first in America by The Literary Guild of America and then by Boni, followed by Duckworth in London [1928].  Apparently this happened because Ford didn’t want to pay taxes or something.  I see one very questionable copy of the earliest edition on Amazon, but there are a number of nice copies of the Boni and Duckworth editions for sale, $300 and below.  God, I’m tired.  Sorry about the excess of words and the dearth of pictures.

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#30 The Good Soldier (1915)

Ford Madox [Hueffer] Ford

I like reading books that are described as Modernist only when they sound exactly like the outmoded books that they replaced.  (This is also how I feel about books that are called Post Modern.)  For this reason I am particularly fond of The Good Soldier, (and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for an example of the latter).  The things that their respective authors achieved that were good and new did not involve removing punctuation, inventing new words, starting the book in the middle of the sentence, or, verily, re-imaging “sentence” and turning the fucking world upside-down. Yes, I am very bitter because three times now I couldn’t finish Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake is obviously out of the question, and it makes me feel stupid, and there must be some kind of support group that I should seek out and join.  I suppose I am the reader’s equivalent of the elderly fellow who complains about the goddamn immigrants not speaking English, when really he just doesn’t understand the changing world around him, and is frightened of his impending death.  Or maybe he’s just a dumb, racist old coot.  Perhaps there is no connection there.

My neuroses aside, The Good Soldier, a short book, seems to me a rich and perfect novel.  It is a less well-known example of the old unreliable narrator, familiar to high school and college students everywhere from The Turn of the Screw (1898).  Remember, the one where the lady squeezed the boy’s neck and he died?  Basically the narrator here, an American named Dowell, is writing the history of his deceased wife Florence and their joint relation to a British couple called Ashburnham.  They are all more or less rich, and Florence and the male Ashburnham have “hearts,” which means they spend all of their time taking waters in continental spas.  I love it because it has things like this in it:

“The given proposition was, that we were all ‘good people.’ We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good light brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water –that sort of thing.”

But meanwhile (and this is a legitimate spoiler, maybe even like a Sixth Sense game-ending spoiler), the narrative has a kind of perverse, inexorable trajectory where you find out Florence is doing it with everybody and never one time with her husband, and you know Ashburnham is going to do something unspeakable, but you aren’t sure what (literally cut his own throat!), and meanwhile you can only speculate at the interior life of the purportedly chaste narrator, but if you’re me you imagine it has something to do with dirty sex, and it’s all very juicy, but described in clear, rather bloodless prose.  Two thumbs up!  I didn’t want it to end!

I don’t have anything very interesting to say about the life of FMF.  He was a big deal, his family was best friends with all of the Pre-Raphaelites so he grew up in their milieu.  In the few photos I have seen he doesn’t look particularly un-prepossessing, but the little fact sheets I have read about him usually manage to get in that he was a success with women despite having a  fat, ugly mug.  Evidently literary biographers are an attractive and judgmental bunch.  (Ford Madox Ford: The Triumph of Genius over Ugly)  His name can be a source of confusion.  I guess he changed it from Hueffer because he didn’t want anyone to think he was some sort of kraut.  But his grandfather, a handsome painter, who was also famous, was named Ford Madox Brown.  It gets even more confusing if you have ever been a child, and read A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has nothing to do with Ford Madox Ford or Ford Madox Brown, but there are characters named, respectively, Madoc, Madog, Maddok, Mad Dog, and Maddox.  Think about that.

Sexy time! The publication history of TGS is neat because it was first published as a short piece called “The Saddest Story” in the first issue of “Percy” Wyndham Lewis’s sexy literary journal BLAST, which was the hot new thing in 1914. It featured Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot (and my favorite poem), and others.  Unfortunately, shortly after the first issue came out, war happened and basically killed everyone’s buzz (and Gaudier-Brzeska).  There was one subsequent issue.  Here’s Blast I (this picture is the one at the Tate), London: John Lane, 1914.

Arst Libri is selling BLAST 1 and 2 together for $2,000.  Number 1 lacks the backstrip, and both issues are chipped, but they sound very good given the frail wrappers format.  They are also on sale together at $2,260, with the wrappers of 2 detached.  There are two copies of Blast 1 by itself online, one good only at $930, one sounds fair at $650.  There were a number of facsimiles and reprints, notably the Black Sparrow edition of 1981, which Jeff Maser has for $450.   The first edition, London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1915, is evidently not common.  Here is Peter Harrington’s very nice copy, which they have at $4,300:

Beautiful!  I don’t have a bibliography so I don’t know if it was issued without a dust jacket or what.  James Jaffe has a very good copy at $3,500 and Commonwealth Books has one at $2,500.

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#14 I, Claudius (1934)

Robert Graves

It just says I, Claudius on the Modern Library list, so I gather they have spurned Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina.  Since I read them together in one paperback volume I am counting them as one novel.  I think they were published the same year, or just one year apart.

At any rate.  I like to read novels.  I don’t like to read non-fiction (except sometimes memoirs) or history of any kind (except Herodotus, but that was one time).  To use a profoundly un-literary metaphor, I can only stomach the vegetables of facts if they are are hidden in the ice cream of novels, particularly those featuring sexy ladies or illegitimate children or going to Oxford.  If the novel is a so-called “historical novel,” especially if it is by James Michener, especially if I find it in a hotel lobby, I  read it, assume it is full of true things, and resolve to remember one of them should the subject ever come up in conversation.  For example, if anyone mentions South Africa, I recall Michener’s seminal work Exodus, which I found a hotel in China and read on the train.  Then I say  “The Broderbund, so evil, so sad,” and hope that the conversation ends soon, before someone can ask what I mean.

My point is, I, Claudius is special because not only is it unusually full of facts and my go-to source for Roman history, it also one of my favorite novels full stop.  Because it is wonderful.  In my extensive research, which was reading the preface to my copy, I learned that Robert Graves, who identified as a poet, wrote IC simply as a way to make fast easy money.  Here’s what I have done to make fast money: 1. Worked in a toy store.  2.  Written someone’s college paper about the movie The Piano with Holly Hunter.  Here’s what Robert Graves did: 1. Read dozens of historical texts in the original Latin and Greek.  2. Used said texts to write a riveting two-volume first-person narrative about the history of Rome 44 B.C. to 54 A.D., subsequently making a ton of money because they were so readable, nay, infinitely readable and also humorous.  So much so that I am compelled to use italics like a heroine out of L. M. Montgomery.

Historical facts according to Claudius the Stammerer (the narrator), according to Robert Graves: Livia convinces Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire, to leave his first wife and marry her; she then uses her position of power to poison almost everybody.  Tiberius is a pervert of shocking magnitude.  Everyone thinks Claudius is lacking mentally but he turns out to be the smart one and ends up in charge before he marries his own awful bitch who brings him down.  There is the old song-and-dance about should Rome be a Republic or have an Emperor, familiar to those of us who have seen the movie Gladiator.  Romans had different ideas about family than modern people do, so everyone is constantly adopting adult children and marrying one another, which is sometimes confusing.  Furthermore, everyone has one of four possible names, plus some extras, but Graves does a very good job of keeping it relatively simple.

Knowing that Graves considered himself a poet before anything else, I have tried to read his poetry.  I didn’t much like it, but I struggle with most poetry.  It is my achilles’ heel.  His (partial) autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), though, is another one of my favorite books.  It describes his experiences at school and in WWI, in a wry, warm way, so that you wish he was your friend.  Although I read (not in his autobiography) that he could be very grumpy, and had woman trouble.  But serious woman trouble, as in he had a long-standing menage-a-trois with his wife and another lady, and he decided he liked his wife better, and the other lady threw herself out of the window, and then he changed his mind about the wife and hobbled off with the other lady after her bones knitted together.  Kind of like a Roman!  Except in Rome, as I know from a book, his new paramour would have convinced him to exile the wife to a malarial island, so she would get a fever and die.

Sexy time! The first edition is London: Arthur Baker, 1934.  Here is a fine copy in a near fine dust jacket, which Nigel Williams is selling for $2,900. 

Charles Parkhurst has a near fine copy in a very good jacket at $2,800.  Less expensive copies lack the dust jacket.  There are a handful of first editions of IC and Claudius the God bound together in morocco or calf, one in the high two-thousands, one around $1,000, and $650. There was also a signed limited edition of 100 copies issued in 1977 by Paradin, and there are currently six copies online between $1,800-$3,600.  Here is Peter Harrington’s, at $2,500.

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#11 Under the Volcano (1947)

Malcolm Lowry’s Ultimate Literary Jam.

I picked this one to go first because I wrote my (undergraduate) thesis about it.  Which, incidentally, was the only thesis I ever wrote.  That’s a good segue into a disclaimer about this whole undertaking: I am not a big deal, and I probably don’t know what I am talking about.

Now then.  I would stop short of saying the novel is a chore to read, but it does, on occasion, try one’s fortitude.  The writing style somehow manages to mimic the experience of lying in the sun with a hangover, on pot.   To read it is to drink the hair of the dog while reflecting on the great failures of your life.  For me, anyway.  The story is also, of course, very depressing.  It documents the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, The Consul, a miserable alcoholic wreck in a backwater in Mexico.  Basically all he does is drink and fall down.  His estranged wife comes to visit, he decides to give  life another shot with her by his side, but he isn’t able to do it with her (sex), and he drinks more, and in the end he gets accidentally shot and dies in a ditch with dogs.  There is a multitude of Meaningful References.  Maximilian and Carlotta, and a lot of Dante because Lowry evidently wanted UtV to serve as one canticle of his own Divine Comedy.  (This was actually what my thesis was about but I can’t remember what I concluded, because it got very heady, because I spent a lot of time researching what happens when you drink to excess, and feeling sad about boys.)  Malcolm Lowry “IRL” was also a miserable alcoholic wreck, the kind that would attend a dinner party and when he left the host discovered that all of the cooking sherry was gone.  I read once that he checked into a hospital to undergo a ghastly modern detox technique wherein for days the patient sat in a small room lit with only a red lightbulb, while doctors periodically injected him or her with a powerful sick-making compound.  An aversion therapy, I guess it was.  Anyway most people only lasted one day before swearing off drink forever and going home, but Malcolm Lowry made it through a week in the injection room before he escaped and went on a two-day bender, during which he drank everything.  This anecdote endears him to me.

Everybody made a great fuss about UtV, which is part of the reason ML was such a disappointment.  He was never able to write anything worthwhile other than UtV, even though he was writing all the time.  He also had terrible luck and it was very common that periodically all of his possessions would catch on fire, in addition to any masterpieces he was working on.  He wrote and published other things, which people weren’t overly enthusiastic about, and he left a lot of unfinished material when he died in what was possibly yet another fuck-up (he overdosed on pills, but it’s unclear whether it was suicide, accident, or something nefarious perpetrated by his long-suffering second wife, Margerie).

So that’s all I have to say about that.

Sexy time! Here is a first edition.  It’s New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.  I gather the book itself is in pale grey cloth.  This is a near fine copy in a fine, slightly restored dust jacket, which Michael Toth is selling for $4,500.  There are a few fine or near fine copies in dust jackets, all between $1,500 and $4,500.  Around $1000 and below are less nice copies, without dust jackets, and first UK editions (Jonathan Cape, also 1947, I believe).

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